“Too Much Knowledge of the Other World”: Women and Nineteenth-Century Irish Folktales

Abstract

The IRISH literary revival of the 1880s and 90s, also known as the Irish Renaissance or Celtic Twilight, was largely inspired by an interest in folklore. While the best known Irish folklore collections remain those by key figures in this movement such as Douglas Hyde, W. B. Yeats, and Lady Augusta Gregory, the popular appetite for Irish folklore had in fact been strong throughout the nineteenth century. This essay examines Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland ( 1825), the first collection of Irish folktales, and Jeremiah Curtin's Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World: Collected from Oral Tradition in Southwest Munster (1895). Both collections draw their material from the same region and focus on tales of personal experience with the supernatural, rather than on heroic legends or wonder tales. Yet their representations of women, and particularly of female storytellers, contrast sharply. The differences in their methodology and style, as well as in the content of the tales, reflect not only the quirks of the individual collectors but also the dramatic social changes in rural Irish life after the Great Famine of 1845 to 49. Curtin 's tales illustrate a marked increase in conflict between the sexes, a phenomenon that historians such as Hasia Diner have attributed to the decline of marriage, the greater economic independence of women, and their tendency to emigrate alone or in all-female groups in the late nineteenth century. Whereas Croker treats female storytellers with an easygoing acceptance and respect, Curtin explicitly declares his bias against them; indeed, his dismissal of women's storytelling skills reinforces a prevailing motif in the tales he selects : that of women who are f orceably silenced. Moreover, the supernatural women in Curtin's collection fairy abductees or ghosts are remarkably vengeful and violent. Tracing the representation of female storytellers and of women's supernatural experiences in specific tales from each collection, I argue that Curtin's tales encode intense social anxieties about marriage and the radical shift in women's roles in nineteenth-century rural Ireland. Before examining each collection, however, I will briefly consider the role of women in Irish oral tradition, an issue Clodagh Brennan Harvey has described as anything but clear {Contemporary Irish 12). Harvey concedes that women most likely participated less in the storytelling than men, citing their preoccupation ... with their domestic responsibilities, which limitfed] their opportunities to hear and to learn new tales, and thus to participate more actively in the tradition (12). At the same time, she suggests that women's storytelling is simply less well documented. Because men and women usually went visiting